http://musliminsuffer.wordpress.com/
bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
Abbas attempts a political coup on behalf of Washington
By Jean Shaoul
18 December 2006
Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah president of the Palestinian Authority, has
announced that he will dissolve the recently elected parliament and call
new presidential and parliamentary elections. Abbas aide Yasser Abed Rabbo
told Associated Press that the president would set the date within a week,
and that new elections would be held within three months.
The move is an unconstitutional attempt to unseat the Hamas-led government
that has been engineered by the United States and Israel. It threatens to
precipitate a full-scale civil war. Washington and Jerusalem also have the
backing of European powers and are being aided and abetted by the Arab
regimes Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and the Gulf States.
The move by Abbas is the product of consultation with the Bush
administration. Washington welcomed the announcement of fresh elections,
saying that it hoped they would help end violence in the region. Britain
and Spain also welcomed the call. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who
was in Cairo as part of a Middle East tour, urged other governments to back
Abbas. Miri Eisin, a spokeswoman for the Israeli government, said that
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert respects Abu Mazen and hopes that he will have
the capability to assert his leadership over all of the Palestinian people.
Abbas echoed the position of the US and European Union in blaming the
economic and political crisis created by Western sanctions on the refusal
of Hamas to recognise Israel or participate in a government that would do
so. The best solution, he said, would be to form a national unity
government that would win the support of the Quartet (US, the European
Union, United Nations and Russia) and enable the resumption of economic aid
to Palestine. But months of talks between Hamas and Fatah have collapsed.
Hamas is vehemently opposed to new elections, having won a four-year term
of office only last January with a landslide victory. It denounced the
decision, calling it a coup against the Palestinian government and the will
of the Palestinian people. Ahmed Yousef, an adviser to Palestinian Prime
Minister Ismail Haniya, said the call for elections was a recipe for
violence. I think this will lead to bloodshed because this is something
against the constitution.
Abu Mazen is not part of the solution anymore. He is part of the problem
now, he continued.
Several Palestinian factions based in the Syrian capital, Damascus, and
including Hamass leadership in exile, also rejected early elections. Any
step outside the context of the laws is rejected by us all and this is not
just the position of Hamas, said Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled
Mashaal. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine supported the
Hamas stance. Islamic Jihad leader Ramadan Shallah, who met with Mashaal in
Damascus, urged Hamas and Fatah to reach an agreement, calling Abbass
decision lawless.
Abbas also announced the revival of the Palestine Liberation Organisation
negotiating department, implying that he was ready to go into talks with
Israel and accede to its terms. A senior Israeli defence spokesman said,
This is a very important internal decision by the Palestinians, which
creates a new opportunity to relinquish the path of terror and return to
the negotiating table.
The decision to call new elections must lead to an escalation of the
internecine warfare now raging between Hamas and Fatah. There is every
possibility that Abbas will use this to declare a state of emergency for 30
days. This would allow him to assume special powers, including those of the
current government.
Abbass announcement has already sparked renewed fighting between Hamas and
Fatah. It directly followed the attempted assassination of Haniya. Hamas
accused Mohammed Dahlan, warlord and former Fatah chief of internal
security in Gaza, of orchestrating the assassination attempt when Haniya
was crossing the border into Gaza from Egypt after a tour of the Middle
East to seek economic aid. Haniya had been detained at the border on the
orders of Israels Defence Minister, Amir Peretz, who instructed the
European monitors at the crossing to refuse his re-entry into Gaza.
Following seven hours of negotiations, the Fatah border guards let Haniya
through after he left the money he had collected in Egypt. But his
detention brought more than 1,000 Hamas members to the checkpoint, and
armed clashes broke out during which a bodyguard was killed and 26 people
were injured, included Haniyas son. Deputy Defence Minister Ephraim Sneh
told Israels Army Radio that government officials made the right decision
not to let Haniyeh bring the money into Gaza, adding that if he had been
killed, I wouldnt put up a mourning tent.
Last Monday, masked gunmen fired on the car carrying the three young
children of Colonel Baha Balousha, to school in Gaza City, killing them and
their driver. Balousha is a Fatah intelligence officer and a leading prison
interrogator during a Fatah crackdown on Hamas during the late 1990s. On
Wednesday, Fatah gunmen killed Bassam El-Farra, a 32-year-old commander of
Hamass military wing and Sharia judge, in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza. On
Thursday, a gun battle broke out when Fatah security forces arrested Hisham
Mukhaimer, a member of the Popular Resistance Committees, in Gaza City, in
connection with the killing of the three young children. More than 40
Palestinians have been killed in factional fighting since March.
On Friday, the West Bank city of Ramallah became a battleground when Hamas
supporters tried to march towards the town centre to celebrate the 19th
anniversary of Hamass founding. They were met by a mass deployment of
Fatah police, and 32 people were wounded by stones and gunfire. In Gaza
City, masked Hamas gunmen battled with Fatah-allied police near a security
post, a block from the home of Mohammed Dahlan.
A policy made in the USA
The Bush administration, once it came to power, opposed and sabotaged any
negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. It supported
Israel in its refusal to recognise Palestinian Authority President Yasser
Arafat as a partner for peace. Arafat was kept under virtual house arrest
and his government compound all but destroyed, after he refused to suppress
the uprising that erupted after Ariel Sharons provocative visit to the
Temple Mount in September 2000. This gave Sharon the green light to expand
the Zionist settlements and launch attacks on the Palestinians when he
subsequently came to power.
The White House favoured Abbas, a businessman, as prime minister, and
Dahlan as his security chief, after both had indicated their willingness to
crack down on militant Palestinian groups. Abbas was appointed as PM by
Arafat on March 19, 2003the very day Iraq was invaded.
At the time, Bush made a pretence of returning to Washingtons role as an
honest broker in the long-running dispute and proposed the Road Map in
late April in order to help British Prime Minister Tony Blair and various
Arab regimes defend their support for the US-led war. While the Road Map
reiterated the commitment to a Palestinian state, even beginning to
implement its provisions was made conditional on the Palestinians ending
all resistance to Israel. But Abbas, too, balked at the civil war that
would have resulted from an attempt to impose the repressive measures
demanded by Washington and Tel Aviv, and resigned in October.
On Arafats death in November 2004, the White House made clear that Abbas
was the only acceptable candidate for the presidency. He assumed the post
in January 2005.
By April 2004, Bush had effectively shelved his Road Map and accepted
Sharons policy of unilateral separation. This meant drawing up Israels
borders to permanently annex much of the West Bank and the whole of
Jerusalem, leaving any future Palestinian state as little more than a few
discontinuous Bantustans hemmed in behind an eight-metre-high concrete barrier.
A pattern was established in which Israel mounted repeated military
assaults designed to provoke a violent response from militant groups that
could be used as the pretext for jettisoning talks and tightening the
border controls, road blocks and curfews that made the Palestinians lives
unbearable. For its part, the US continuously reiterated that statehood was
entirely dependent upon Abbas suppressing opposition to Israel.
But this policy was to backfire. Abbass close relations with the US, the
increasing economic hardship imposed on the Palestinians by Israel and
widespread government corruption only served to alienate the mass of the
Palestinians from Fatah, and strengthen Hamas. As a result, Hamas won a
landslide victory in the parliamentary elections in January.
The consistent response by the US and Israel has been to seek to overthrow
the government and to stoke up the tensions between Hamas and Fatah in the
hope of precipitating civil war. Washington ensured that international
sanctions prevented any economic aid from reaching the Palestinian
government, while Israel withheld $600 million in taxes due to the
Palestinian Authority and threatened Hamas with the assassination of their
leaders, including the prime minister himself.
Last summer, Israel launched a full-scale war on Gaza that killed more than
300 people in order to scupper efforts to secure the acceptance by Hamas of
the so-called Prisoners Charter, which accepted a two-state solution
that implicitly recognised Israel, and tried to facilitate a common command
structure between Hamas and Fatah.
It now appears that the US and Israel are preparing to subcontract the task
of suppressing the Palestinians to Fatah. Washington has encouraged Abbas
to strengthen the power of the presidency to counter the Hamas government,
and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she would ask Congress for
tens of millions of dollars for Abbass security forces.
There is evidence that the US has been making preparations for the civil
conflict that has been provoked by Abbbass announcement for months. A
report in the November 18 Economist noted that Lt. Gen. Kenneth Dayton,
Americas security envoy to the Palestinians, had said that the Quartet
should give up any hopes of a unity government and back Abbas by whatever
means necessary to help him take on Hamas. The Economist cites a diplomatic
source as saying that the other three members of the Quartet balked at this
because it would be tantamount to backing one side in a future civil war.
Abbass announcement is in line with the hostile response of the Bush
administration and Israel to the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report
that urges the US to make some concessions to the Palestinians as part of a
wider initiative to stabilise the Middle East. The White Houses response
echoes the dictum of Sharon: When in crisis, escalate, escalate,
escalate. Nothing short of complete submission by the Palestinians to
Washingtons dictates will do: the time has come for Abbas and neighbouring
Arab bourgeoisies to impose this on the long-suffering Palestinians by
brute force on Israels behalf.
To this end, according to an earlier report in the November 4 edition of
the Economist, the US is already financing a training camp near the West
Bank city of Jericho for the Palestinians Force 17, for new recruits for
the presidential guard, as part of its plans for security reform. Israel
has sanctioned the transfer of heavy weaponry from Jordan in the form of
the Badr Brigade, a Jordanian-based division of the Palestinian Liberation
Army, which operates largely under Jordanian command, and allowed Fatahs
militia, Tanzim, to rearm.
The Economist cites Abbass advisors as saying that these troops would
provide the backbone of a force of tens of thousands to take on Hamas,
whose own forces are said to number 5,700 in Gaza and 1,500 in the West Bank.
source:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/dec2006/gaza-d18.shtml
===
-muslim voice-
______________________________________
BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW
_______________________________________________
is-lam mailing list
[email protected]
http://milis.isnet.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/is-lam
